 |
| Victor Davis Hanson |
“Years ago,” Victor Davis Hanson tells us in his latest column, “[President Barack] Obama invited the Russians into Syria, empowered dictatorial Syria, berated Israel nonstop and all but ignored the violence of Iran’s surrogate terrorists: Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
“But after Oct. 7, Israel retaliated to the mass slaughter
of Jewish civilians with all-out war against Hamas and Hezbollah — rendering
these once-feared terrorists nearly impotent.”And then, hauling us before a
present historical tribune, he notes, “The 2024 anemic Democratic campaign and
the Trump Electoral College and popular-vote victories — combined with record
defections of Hispanic and African-American voters from the Democratic Party to
Trump — proved a resounding rejection of the Obama legacy and his surrogates’
left-wing visions.”
This is, to be sure, fairly rough handling, but then history
is a rough handler, and Hanson’s view of Obama’s “lost mystique” likely is both
prescient – Hanson is an historian – and historically accurate.
“The Obamas,” Hanson writes, “ignored or withheld from the
public their own firsthand knowledge that Biden was suffering from signs of
dementia. Instead, they found Biden’s cognitive decline and his former
concocted reputation as workingman’s Joe useful as a veneer for a veritable
Obama third-term, ‘phone it in’ administration. Or, as a wistful Obama once
conditioned his dream of a third term: ’If I could make an arrangement where I
had a stand-in, a front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in . . .’”
American presidents from Obama through President-Elect
Donald Trump’s second term in office owe Benjamin Netanyahu a great deal. He
has, through his military campaign against the enemies of Israel, reshaped
American policy in the Middle East – for the better. Hamas is on its last legs.
Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon is but a shadow of its former self. Iran is
tottering. Syria, without the Assads, father and son, at the helm, has
dissolved into its former condition as a collection of antagonistic and
sometimes warring tribes. For Netanyahu, war against enemies bent upon the
destruction of Israel has been diplomacy by other means.
Past American administrations should be grateful to him.
But, as Hanson points out, Barack the puppeteer and his puppet Biden would be
grateful only for a peace that is no peace and the destruction of Netanyahu’s
political career. All the obstructionists to a rational policy in the Middle
East have now been considerably weakened – including Netanyahu’s American
political critics, Biden and Obama – both of whom have lost luster in the face
of Netanyahu’s Churchillian assault on the enemies of Israel. Churchill served
notice to a doubting world in June, 1940 that Britain “shall fight on the
beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields,
and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!”
Asked what he would do if the Obama-Biden administration
should withhold armaments necessary for an Israeli victory over terrorists
financed by Iran, Netanyahu said, “We will fight [against our enemies] with
our fingernails.”
Political analysts who secretly admire America’s turn to the
left under Obama-Biden now are concerning themselves with the possible “autocratic”
regime of a returning President Trump during the next four years. The following
four years will be, they promise us, autocratic if not dictatorial. This is
mostly campaign buncombe that had been a conspicuous failure in the recently
concluded 2024 elections. The rhetorical product of Democrat presidential hopeful Vice president Kamala Harris did
not sell. Nothing could be more obvious.
Writing of the Obama era, which includes Biden and Harris --
Hanson tells us, “Their radical menu since 2021 had divided and nearly wrecked
the nation — hyperinflation, 12 million illegal aliens, a ruined border,
spiraling crime, a shattered foreign policy of appeasement, the popular
backlash against DEI/woke/trans chauvinism, partisan lawfare and weaponization
of the government.”
Leftist socialist rhetoric has become a dead bell. It no
longer summons and activates either the national imagination or the spiritual
ethos of the general public. Only the establishment of gulags for wealthy
entrepreneurs can at this point save Democrat-quasi-socialists. When last heard
from, socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was proposing a 100%
expropriation of the wealth of obscene American billionaires. And if the filthy
rich, relying upon the safe haven of constitutional property laws, refuse to go
quietly into Sanders’ good night, well then – Get thee to a gulag!
In politics, Hollywood entertainment and pop-cultural
analysis, the truth usually follows – it rarely precedes – the eulogies, but
here Hanson has set our feet on a historically righteous path.
Comments